If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefoxas your Browser.0930-1500 KENYA TIMENormal Board - The Whole shebangPrompt Board Next day settlementExpert Board All you need re an Individual stock.

This “rich and dazzling” (Wall Street Journal) novel follows Jim Nashewho, after squandering an unexpected inheritance, picks up a younggambler named Jack Pozzi hoping to con two millionaires. But whentheir plans backfire, Jim and Jack are indentured by their elusivemarks and are forced to build a meaningless wall with bricks gatheredfrom ruins of an Irish castle. Time passes, their debts mount, andanger builds as the two struggle to dig themselves out of theirKafkaesque serfdom.

New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)brings us back into his strange, shape-shifting world of fiendishbargains and punitive whims, where chance is a powerful yetunpredictable force.

“It's just another word for the same thing. You want to believe insome hidden purpose. You're trying to persuade yourself there's areason for what happens in the world. I don't care what you callit--God or luck or harmony-- it all comes down to the same bullshit.It's a way of avoiding the facts, of refusing to look at how thingsreally work.” ―

The Living Planet Report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature said theglobal populations of mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians havefallen by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014.The report, published every two years, aims to assess the state of theworld's wildlife.The 2018 edition said only a quarter of the world's land area is nowfree from the impact of human activity and the proportion will havefallen to just a 10th by 2050.It said "Earth is losing biodiversity at a rate seen only during massextinctions."It blamed exploding human consumption, climate change, pollution,farming and deforestation.The report noted that although forest loss has been slowed byreforestation in some regions in recent decades, the loss has"accelerated in tropical forests that contain some of the highestlevels of biodiversity on Earth".It said South and Central America suffered the most dramatic declinein vertebrate populations - an 89 percent loss in vertebratepopulations compared with 1970.Marine freshwater species are particularly at risk, the report said.Plastic pollution has been detected in the deepest parts of the word'soceans, including the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.Freshwater species - living in lakes, rivers and wetlands - have seenan 83 percent decline in numbers since since 1970, according to thereport.

Chinese ruler Xi Jinping ordered the Southern Theater Command of thePeople’s Liberation Army (PLA), which covers both the South China Seaand Taiwan, to “prepare for war.”Because no country is threatening China, Xi must be thinking oneoption is to launch an attack in the not too distant future.“President Xi’s exhortation to the PLA’s Southern Theater Commandleadership to ‘prepare for war’ is not a new directive,” James Fanell,a leading naval commentator, told The Daily Beast.“Like his predecessor, Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army tobe able to have the capability to take Taiwan by military force by2020. We are now just 14 months from 2020; it is time for America totake these statements seriously and prepare for the worst case.”

Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud, reportedlyextended a personal invitation to Mahathir to visit the Gulf kingdomfollowing the Saudi foreign minister’s visit. Malaysia’s foreignminister told reporters that the premier would “consider the righttime for the visit as he is busy right now.”

Hunter Thompson had America’s number before most of us even knew.Attending the 1964 Republican convention that resulted in hard-rightArizona Senator Barry Goldwater becoming the party’s nominee forpresident, Thompson was “genuinely frightened at the violent reaction[the gathering] provoked,” including hostility toward the media.Several years later, he noted that Richard Nixon “represents thatdark, venal and incurably violent side of the American characteralmost every other country in the world has learned to fear anddespise.” The country itself, he wrote, was “just a nation of 220million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, andno qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries tomake us uncomfortable.”

“As a freelance journalist he really had the chance to be present forthese world-changing moments. He had an ear for history, moments thatmight in retrospect define not just a year or an event but a kind ofsegment of American history, and that’s something that’s beenoverlooked in his writing.”

Denevi describes what he calls the “Faustian bargain” Thompson madewhen he began taking ADHD-combatting Dexedrine in 1964. “Instead ofchanging the more detrimental aspects of his life — terrible sleeprhythms, drinking all day every day since he was 14 — he could use theDexedrine to either recover and to push himself beyond and to in somesense make it a matter of will instead of a matter of personallimitations,” he says. Denevi was able to see one of Thompson’s’infamous pills when a friend showed him a letter from Thompsoncomplete with one of the little orange tablets still taped to it.

Even though Nixon’s presidency would collapse, Denevi argues thatThompson wasn’t uplifted by his arch-enemy’s fall. In another momentof synchronicity, Thompson was swimming in the Watergate hotel poolwhen news of the Democratic headquarters break-in made the news. Butby the time of the Watergate hearings (which he initially just watchedon TV but wound up covering for Rolling Stone), Thompson wasoverloaded and taking pills, alcohol and now cocaine. “When Nixonleft, Thompson has that beautiful passage about how it’ll never thesame in Washington — the circus is leaving town,” he says. “A lighthad kind of gone out of the world in terms of inspiration and thefight he was fighting had, in a sense, ended. He still wrote some verybeautiful essays after that, but he never seemed able to sustain thesame book length.”

The maker of chocolate M&M’s and Snickers sees a growing risk on thehorizon: sliding cocoa supply from one of the world’s top growers.The answer? Comics and WiFi. Mars Inc., maker of candy famous toconsumers across the world, is among firms trying to lure millennialsinto cocoa farming in Indonesia, where aging planters, decaying trees,pests and diseases have depressed output so much that the nation hasbecome a net importer. The hope is that the younger set, attracted byfree Internet, will get hooked on cocoa at themed cafes and bepersuaded to return to the farms.“We opened a cafe that has WiFi, and many pictures and objects aboutcocoa farming, and it’s attracted a lot of teenagers because of theWiFi,” said Arie Nauvel Iskandar, chairman of the Indonesia CocoaAssociation and director of corporate affairs at PT Mars SymbioscienceIndonesia. “It’s just one way to introduce young people to cocoa.”The association, which is working with Mars and other companies toboost supply, says output could rise 15 percent next year to 300,000metric tons as trees planted in recent years mature. To ensure cropgrowth doesn’t flag after that, a national program will kick in topush output to 600,000 tons by 2024, said Iskandar. The plan aims notonly to attract millennials, but make stronger clones and more fundingavailable to curb pests and diseases, he said.A crop of that size would be large enough to meet rising demand fromdomestic processors, and supply the world market, said Iskandar. “Withthe best farming practices, mentoring, proper fertilizer and the rightplanting materials, we’ll be able to meet the target,” he said.The increased output may go some way to ease chocolate makers’dependence on the world’s biggest growers, Ivory Coast and Ghana, asdemand climbs in the next few years. The global chocolateconfectionery market grew 2.5 percent in the nine months throughApril, according to Barry Callebaut AG, the top cocoa processor, inJuly, citing data from analytics firm Nielsen.“Cocoa must be seen as an option for living and having a good future,”Iskandar said in an interview Friday. “Many farmers send theirchildren away to school, so they don’t follow in their father’sfootsteps because they feel a farmer’s life is hard. We have to giveenough information to them and the millennials” to change thatperception, he said.The national program will be finalized next year and start under thenew administration in early 2020 at the latest, he said. Indonesiaholds presidential elections in April.Cocoa areas have shrunk to about 1.3 million hectares as land isconverted to residential or infrastructure use, or farmers switch tomore profitable crops such as palm oil, according to Iskandar. Thearea was about 1.7 million hectares in 2010, the association said lastyear.Indonesia is the largest palm oil producer, accounting for about halfof global supply. While palm is grown mainly in Sumatra andKalimantan, there’s been a massive expansion of plantations inSulawesi in the past few years, threatening cultivation of cocoa.Sulawesi accounts for about 70 percent of the nation’s cocoaproduction.

The World Bank has approved $1.2 billion in grants and loans to Ethiopia.The bank said in a statement posted on its website late on Tuesdaythat the funds — a $600 million grant and a $600 million loan — wouldgo towards supporting reforms in the financial sector includingimproving the investment climate.In response to the reform pledges made by the government since PrimeMinister Abiy Ahmed took office in April, the bank is providing newfinancial and technical support, it said in the statement.The support will promote public-private partnerships “to improveefficiency in key sectors” including telecom, power, and tradelogistics, the bank said.

Naspers Ltd. soared the most in close on four years Wednesday asinvestors got two pieces of good news.Naspers benefited from a 5.9 percent rally in its 31 percent-ownedTencent Holdings Ltd. in Hong Kong, the biggest gain for the Chineseinternet giant in 2 1/2 weeks. Secondly, index compiler MSCI Inc. saidovernight it has decided against penalizing companies with multipleshare classes -- like Naspers -- with reduced representation in itsequity benchmarks.Africa’s largest company by value jumped as much as 9.7 percent, themost since December 2014, after MSCI said equities with unequal votingstructures will continue to be eligible for inclusion in its indexesat their free float market capitalization weight.“Given how big Naspers is for the South African market, where manyinvestors can’t own Naspers’s full weighting in the Top 40 Indexbecause it is higher than their maximum holding allocation, manyNaspers shareholders would be people who own it throughemerging-market indexes,” said Bright Khumalo, a portfolio manager atVestact Asset Management in Johannesburg. “If they had to drop out ofthe index, it would be a big hit in the short run for the Naspersshare price. That threat is now removed.”Naspers accounts for 16 percent of the benchmark FTSE/JSE Africa AllShare Index, pushing the gauge as much as 3.6 percent higherWednesday. The stock is 20 percent of the market’s TOP40 TradeableIndex. Naspers was 8.4 percent higher as of 12:45 p.m.